Networked control of a Parrot Mambo drone

The current study proposes a network control structure for small low-cost drones like the Parrot Mambo mini-drone. The structure is composed of an inner loop running on the drone, and an outer loop running on a remote computer. The inner loop controls the attitude and altitude of the drone based on Kalman filter estimations from the onboard sensors. The outer loop ensures position tracking based on measurements from OptiTrack cameras. A time delay compensator is added to address the constraints imposed by wireless network communications between the drone and the remote computer. Experimental results using Parrot Mambo drones show good stability and tracking performances, despite model uncertainty and time delay.